‘Seattle’ Copenhagen call, as Africans demand reparations

‘Seattle’ Copenhagen call, as Africans demand reparations

Patrick Bond – Z Magazine
Sep-06-2009

Here’s a fairly simple choice: the Global North would pay hard-hit Global South sites to deal with climate crisis either through complicated, corrupt, controversial ‘Clean Development Mechanism’ (CDM) projects with plenty of damaging side effects to communities, or instead pay through other mechanisms that must provide financing quickly, transparently and decisively, to achieve genuine income compensation plus renewable energy to the masses.

The Copenhagen climate summit in December is all about the former choice, because the power bloc in Europe and the US have put carbon trading at the core of their emissions reduction strategy, while the two largest emitters of carbon in the Third World, China and India, are the main beneficiaries of CDM financing.

What that means is that problems caused when Al Gore’s US delegation brought pro-corporate compromises to Kyoto in 1997 – promising US sign-on to Kyoto (hah, what a lie) in exchange for carbon trading – are going to now amplify, and haunt us for a very long time, unless serious reforms are achieved in Copenhagen.

They won’t be, and nor will any substantive agreement emerge, hinted the new UN Development Programme director, New Zealand’s neoliberal former prime minister Helen Clark, this week: ‘The success of the Copenhagen summit on climate change in December will not depend on a final international deal being sealed there.